Wednesday, November 28, 2012

In case you're not on facebook or twitter...

I'm pleased to have a poem in the gorgeous Moon Edition of New Linear Perspectives, an Edinburgh-based online literary magazine, alongside poems from Sammi Gale and Anne Rouse.
You can read the magazine here.

I've not been blogging much recently, shock-horror - I've actually been writing poems instead of moaning on here about the lack of poems!

Back to that thorny issue of whether putting draft poems on the blog for a short period of time counts as self-publication. More and and more poetry mags seem to be stipulating that they cannot accept submissions that have previously been published in print, on the web or appeared on a blog. As anyone who reads this blog well knows, my usual practice is to put up first drafts for a limited period of time as a form of workshopping. But this is becoming more problematic in limiting where I can submit my poems to. When I first started putting draft poems on the blog, the end result poem was often dramatically different but I have to admit that now the changes are mostly minor between the first draft and the final poem that I submit for publication. I'm not posting my latest poem on here because I want to submit it somewhere which counts blog appearances as publication. This isn't to say that I'll never again post a draft poem, the workshopping element has been essential to my writing in the past but perhaps just not every poem or only the poems I'm really struggling with.

As someone who likes reading about such things, here are my current personal poetry stats:
I have thirty-six A4 pages comprising of twenty-eight poems to either cherry-pick from for a pamphlet collection or build on for a full-length collection.

Of the twenty-eight poems, seventeen have been published:
6 in Shadowtrain
5 in Northwords Now
2 in From Glasgow to Saturn
1 in Starry Rhymes Anthology and Ink, Sweat and Tears
1 in Gutter Magazine
1 in Ink Sweat and Tears
1 (about to be) in New Linear Perspectives

Ten poems I'm waiting to hear back about and one I haven't sent out yet.

I've now written seven pages worth of Israel poems and I'm sure there are more to come so it looks like that will be a bit of a focus in whatever future collection I manage to put together.

email

sorlil@hotmail.co.uk

"Scottish nationalist and feminist perspectives are refracted through a singular imagination drawn to the elemental... McCready is interested in the mysteries of birth and death, the mutability of matter, nature, myth, female experience and history as narrative of women's lives"